Opinion | Sitaram Yechury: Memories From My JNU Days

It was in the year 1986 when I first heard of Sitaram Yechury. I had just joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and was told by a fellow student that we should go to hear him speak. JNU in those days had the tradition of organising talks in hostel messes after dinner, around 9 pm. Leaders, intellectuals, journalists and academics were invited to speak on various topics and students used to attend such talks in great numbers. In those days, JNU was a great centre of learning and had not been invaded by regressive forces. Frank discussions on any subject irrespective of the ideology and religion was the rule; nobody complained, nobody would get hurt, and every speaker had to go through the gruelling rigour of students' questions.

Sitaram Yechury was a speaker I was always fascinated to listen to despite my disagreement with his ideology. That day, when I heard him speak, I was simply blown away by his erudition, depth of knowledge, and his command over language.  Little did I know that after leaving the university, as a reporter I would be covering the Left Front and thus the Communist Party Of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), of which Yechury was a prominent leader and Politburo member.

When Communism Was Waning

During my stay in JNU, the communist movement across the globe had almost waned, except in countries like China and Cuba. Sitaram himself was a JNU alumnus and senior to me by more than a decade. When he was a student leader, the world was divided between two superpowers. It had been the era of the Cold War. But by the time he was inducted into the central committee of the CPI(M) in 1984, communism had come to be in deep crisis, and nobody understood it better than Mikhail Gorbachev.

After taking charge of the USSR, Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) tried to salvage the situation. He introduced two words - 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika'. He realised much before any leader in the Soviet bloc that the way communism had evolved as a totalitarian system, it needed urgent restructuring (Perestroika). As a cure, he also tried to introduce openness (Glasnost) in the rigid Soviet system. But he ultimately failed and presided over the demise of the Soviet Union. This was the time when China was valiantly fighting to stop the very same demise. 

The Tiananmen Massacre

At that time, Deng Xiaoping was at the helm of affairs in China. He dealt with the revolt of the Chinese students in 1989 with an iron fist, not hesitating to run tanks over them at Tiananmen Square. It was the month of June, and I still remember distinctly that when the news of the bloody suppression of students reached JNU, students with left leanings had tears in their eyes. Being a disciplined soldier of the party, Yechury, whose party CPI(M) after breaking away from the CPI had taken the Chinese line, came to JNU to support and justify Chinese repression at Tiananmen in which hundreds of people were killed. He could utter only ten words - "Not a drop of blood was shed on Tiananmen Square" - before the fury of the students stopped him from speaking a word more. Despite JNU being dominated by the Students' Federation of India, the CPI(M)'s student wing, Yechury had to leave the campus, not to return soon.

I was too young to comprehend how a leader of his stature could be so blind so as not to see the truth. This was my first lesson about ideology, that it invariably creates a world of blindness where even the brightest ones refuse to see the most obvious. Therefore, I was not surprised when I read Yechury's report about Romania, a communist country then ruled by Nicolae Ceausescu, a dictator. Yechury had just come back from Romania and the report that he submitted to the party said that everything was all fine and peaceful there. Within a few weeks, Romania exploded and Ceausescu was executed by the firing squad on December 25, 1989. 

When My Image Of Yechury Changed

These two events created a very different image of Yechury in my then-impressionable mind. For me, he was a ruthless and hard-headed communist leader. In 1995, when I joined Aaj Tak which at the time was only a 20-minute news show on Doordarshan, I was asked to cover Left parties. Now, it was my professional duty to meet Yechury and other left leaders and interact with them. But the minute I met Yechury, my perception of him changed. Here was the most loveable man with whom one could have a peaceful argument even when you differed from him violently. He was a man who was truly democratic, though he was bound by the discipline of the party's democratic centralism. He had no airs, and despite knowing my views, he never shut the door on me. 

Sitaram was one of the most brilliant academically oriented leaders I would come across in my entire journalistic career. Unlike his JNU friend and colleague Prakash Karat, he was a pragmatic politician. In 1996, when the Congress led by P.V. Narasimha Rao lost the elections and the third front helmed by the United Front chose Jyoti Basu to be the Prime Minister, the CPI(M) refused to acquiesce to the demand. The party's Politburo had agreed, but the central committee rejected the choice. It was a strange situation. Two of the biggest leaders of the party - Jyoti Basu and the then party general secretary, Harkishan Singh Surjit - were of the opinion that Basu should become the Prime Minister, but ultimately, a majority led by Karat in the Central Committee prevailed. Sitaram Yechury was also not in favour of Basu becoming the Prime Minister. He never expressed his opinion openly but shared it privately with us. 

On Rethinking Communism

Unlike Karat, Yechury was not a doctrinaire. He knew that the days of dogmatic ideology were over. In a democratic polity like India, the CPI(M) should change. He was a leader in the mould of his boss Harkishan Singh Surjit, who had contacts and friends in every party. The CPI(M) committed another blunder in 2008 when it withdrew support from the Manmohan Singh government. It was Karat who was leading the group in the party, with Yechury being in the minority. History is witness. The CPI(M) committed two blunders, and after the nuclear deal fiasco, it could never spring back on its feet. The party once had governments in three states - Bengal, Kerala and Tripura - but it gradually lost two of them and today stands on the verge of losing the third, too: Kerala. The CPI(M) is fighting for its existence today.

Yechury became the General Secretary of the party in 2015, but by then, the politics of the country had changed beyond recognition; secularism, the defining creed of India since independence, was gasping for breath. 

For Yechury, The Idea Of India Was Foremost

Sitaram failed to revive his party. But he was of the firm opinion that to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the entire opposition had to come together. For that, he was ready to take his staunch political rival Mamata along in the opposition camp. It was also rumoured that informally, he was one of the principal advisers of Rahul Gandhi. 

In Sitaram Yechury, the country has lost a great son of India who till his last breath believed in the idea of India, for which he was willing to make any sacrifice. He was a communist by heart, but his communism was not of the past. It is unfortunate that his party did not listen to him and that by the time the baton was passed to him, it was already too late. I will always remember Yechury as my university senior who, like a good JNU-ite, was ever ready to debate and fight for democracy. Yechury left us at a time when more than his party, the country needed him. Goodbye, comrade. 

(Ashutosh is the author of 'Hindu Rashtra' and co-founder of SatyaHindi.com)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author